EJP | News | Germany | New German history exhibition focuses on Nazis

	Thursday, November 20, 2008 22 Cheshvan, 5769

News

France

Germany

Western Europe

Eastern Europe

EU-Israel affairs

US 2008 ELECTION

Iran - Holocaust

Voices

Culture

In Depth

Mideast Crisis

World Cup

On Anglo Jewry

Week at a glance

France Election

EU and Annapolis Summit

News from outside of Europe

Holocaust Remembrance Day

July 2008 at a glance

The Calendar

Links

New German history exhibition focuses on Nazis

Updated: 05/Jun/2006 17:11

Page tools

	Email to friend
	Print this page
	Bookmark this page
	Add your view

BERLIN (AFP) --- An exhibition exploring the tumultuous history of Germany has reopened with the story of the Nazis brought to the fore.

Roman artifacts, a bullet-pierced globe from Hitler's office and chunks of the Berlin Wall are all part of the sprawling permanent exhibition opened by Chancellor Angela Merkel last Friday that attempts to explain what it has meant over the last 2,000 years to be German.

The idea of a comprehensive exhibition on German history was the brainchild of conservative former chancellor Helmut Kohl in 1987, which he intended to house in a new building next to the Reichstag.

But two years later history itself dictated events with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the exhibition was planned at the Baroque salmon-colored Zeughaus, a former Prussian armory on the historic Unter den Linden boulevard which housed East Germany's museum of "the Socialist German Nation".

The initial show that ran during the 1990s was widely criticized as arbitrary, staid and even tinged with nationalism, particularly because the section on the Nazi period was relatively small and tucked in a dark corner.

Hitler's uniforms

The new show puts German history's darkest chapter front and center, with a ground-floor exhibit that includes Nazi uniforms, Hitler's desk, a bomb shelter, letters sent from concentration camps, Albert Speer's design for the gargantuan Germania Hall and a chilling model of the Auschwitz death camp.

	Resisting the occupier with yellow roses
	Young Balkan Jews given identity boost in Greece
	The Third Reich and Music
	Holocaust Memorial in Berlin attracts 3.5 million visitors
	Nazi archives soon available to historians
	Munich faces up to its brown past

Hitler's globe with its fitting symbolism is expected to be a major attraction. A Russian soldier who had just taken the capital in 1945 took aim at Berlin on the giant sphere, leaving a gaping hole on the map where the German Reich had been.

The globe was the inspiration for the legendary dance scene in Charlie Chaplin's 1940 Hitler satire "The Great Dictator".

The new show carefully steers clear of an overarching idea of national identity, putting the accent on the regional flavor of the Bavarians, the Saxons and the Prussians.

"German is not a race," Ottomeyer said in a pointed rejection of Nazi notions of Aryan superiority. "German is a language that gave birth to a culture."

Tumultuous past

Guests enter the exhibition through a Roman gate and trace the tumultuous path of the nation's history from the bitter battles fought by the Germanic tribes through to the euphoria of German reunification in 1990.

With more than 8,000 objects on display across 7,500 square meters of exhibition space, the history show covers everything from the precious to the mundane.

Highlights include Napoleon's two-pointed hat, retrieved by Field Marshal Gebhard von Bluecher after the Battle of Waterloo; the mercenary Albrecht von nig Wallenstein's epee from the Thirty Years' War; pith helmets, weapons and prayer books; Kaisers' portraits and agitprop posters from the Nazis to the Communists.

"History has become in vogue - we need it to find our way in a divisive world," German Historical Museum director Hans Ottomeyer told reporters.

The exhibition also brings German history into the multimedia age with 100 computer stations that allow visitors to scroll through biographies and digital reproductions of invaluable documents.

Key buildings in architectural history are projected onto partitions while catastrophes like the plague are documented with the original 14th century protective masks.

Merkel received a tour of the exhibition with 750 guests Friday ahead of the opening to the public on Saturday.

Day in history

1945: Germany

The Nuremberg Trials begin. Trials against 24 Nazi war criminals of World War II start at the Nuremberg Palace of Justice.